Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
Undoubtedly there are extremist elements on the left (and right) who will be outraged regardless of the outcome. I think the better question is what comes after Republicans winning the house and senate.
Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era? Do we unite around democracy and liberalism in the face of Russia invading Ukraine and China doing China things, or continue to sour on our ideals and flirt with authoritarianism? I don't mean taking military action against either, but for America to lead the free world it has to believe in it, and it has to believe that is more important than what are mostly low-stakes domestic squabbles. Unilateral action from either side won't lead to de-escalation; all the stakeholders need to buy into it.
The first one.
Both parties have learned that bipartisanship is bad because it's better to have no wins than give your opponents a shared win.
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I'd be thrilled with a few years of gridlock. For legislation, "better than nothing" is a high standard.
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Bill Clinton (D), whose laws today are derided by dems as being too racist, ie too rightist. Yet it is the Republicans whom the media accuses of moving away from the centre.
Weird compromise where even if one party wholly adopted the positions of the other, it would still be insufficient.
You appear to have missed the word "compromise", and have concluded that the legislation in an era with a Democrat president perfectly reflected the policy positions of the Democrats regardless of who held the legislature.
Was the error founded in ignorance or partisanship? Either way, you're part of today'a political problem.
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Meanwhile, the right bitches about NAFTA, free trade, globalization, trickle-down economics and military intervention abroad even as they pushed it in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. What? You don't want those things anymore? Huh. Funny how that works.
About 20% of the electorate was too young to vote during the Clinton era. Pretend population growth was zero and another ~20% of voters died in the last 25 years. So maybe 40% of the electorate turned over...and you're surprised that neither Democrats nor Republicans want the same things they did? The fact that you want the 90s frozen in amber forever rather than the 70s or 50s says more about you than the media or either political party.
Was military intervention right-coded in the Clinton era? I wasn't politically engaged then but I know in the West Wing "Republicans want to have the biggest army and never send it anywhere" was presented as a commonplace joke.
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